‘I should think so,’ says Mrs Stroud. ‘I can’t believe your father would like to hear you talking to a grown-up like that.’
‘Stepfather,’ says Bel.
‘Whatever,’ says Mrs Stroud. Leans her chin on her hand and glares at her magazine.
Bel looks at her aslant. Turns her back and shifts her bag across the shelf to cover her hand movements. She picks up a Curly Wurly and balances it on the pick-’n’-mix pot. Then quickly, surreptitiously, she snatches up a four-finger Kit Kat and drops it into the depths of her bag.
‘How much are the Flying Saucers?’ she asks, casually.
‘Two p,’ says Mrs Stroud, not looking up.
Two p? They’re a penny each over in the shop at Great Barrow. God, Mrs Stroud knows how to rip every last penny out of people too young to drive a car. Bel selects one in each colour and drops them into the pot, then goes up to the counter to make her purchases. The Kit Kat seems to be generating heat through the walls of her bag. She has the money to pay for it, but that’s not the point.
Out in the silent village day – too early for teenagers, the grown-ups at work or fiddling away being house proud – she finds the Walker girl sitting on the Bench, glumly drumming her heels on thin air. She sits down next to her.
‘Hi,’ she says.
The girl ignores her.
Bel feels around in her bag – not much in there apart from a copy of Jackie and her purse – until her fingers close on the stolen Kit Kat. She pulls it out, offers it.
‘What?’ asks the girl.
‘I got you this.’
The girl looks suspicious. Glares at Bel.
‘What for?’
‘Whatever. D’you want it or not?’
‘How much?’ she asks doubtfully.
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I’ve got money,’ she says, aggressively. ‘I’m not a bloody charity case.’
‘Yeah,’ says Bel, ‘but I didn’t pay for it, you see.’
The girl looks stunned. Then admiring. Then curious.
‘Silly cow,’ says Bel.
The girl laughs. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Silly cow.’
She takes the chocolate, finds a trench beneath the wrapper and runs a thumbnail down it. Snaps off a finger. ‘D’you want some?’ she asks, unenthusiastically. Offering stuff to someone else comes uneasily to her. She doesn’t get much chance to practise.
‘No thanks,’ says Bel airily, and shows her paper bag of sweets. ‘I’m fine.’
The girl is relieved, but doesn’t say it. The two sit quietly for a while in blazing sunshine, savouring the twin pleasures of sugar and summer holidays.
‘I’m Jade,’ says the girl, eventually.
‘I’m Bel,’ says Bel.
Chapter Eleven
Martin tries Jackie again. He’s been ringing all day, and all evening, ever since she vanished in that minicab. Knows she’ll answer eventually; and if she doesn’t, he’ll go back up there and wait for her to come home.
He fills in a couple of hours by googling Kirsty Lindsay, the journalist who tried to chat him up on the beach. A bit of him had expected to find that she was just pretending to be a journalist – he’s never heard of her and thought she seemed pretty unprofessional, the way she just started talking to him like that, without identifying herself – but to his surprise he finds that she does exist; that she has scores of bylines, in fact.
He trawls through the Google hits to learn the nature of the beast while he waits for Jackie to answer. He knows that her phone is working again, because he dialled it once when he was following her down Fore Street, heard it ring in her pocket and saw her pull it out and check the display. It’s only a matter of time before she responds, he thinks. All women want a man who’s loyal. They say so all the time. Well, if she wants loyal, he’ll show her loyal. No matter how long it takes. The phone rings out, again and again. He wonders if she knows that her voicemail has been deactivated.
He wonders about journalists as he reads. About their intrusive nosiness, their assumptions, the way they damn entire groups with a single sentence. The hacking scandal was just the tip of the iceberg, really. Lindsay doesn’t seem much worse, or much better, than the rest of them. She doesn’t seem to have any specialist knowledge, or cover any particular subjects, other than that most of what she writes about happens in the south-east. But she’s certainly got opinions. Plenty of those.
He rings Jackie. He waited, after she left in the minicab, until it got dark, until all the lights were on in her block and the doors firmly locked, and then he left. He doesn’t give up easily, but he’s not a fool. She’s gone away for the night. Has she got a new man? Replaced him that easily, that casually? No. It can’t be that. He’s seen enough of her life to know that she’s not been dating.
He sits with the phone between his knees and glances at the clock radio: 10.45 – news over, Question Time in full swing. He’ll ring her once more, then he’ll watch to the end of that and try her again. She has to answer eventually.
He carries on reading Lindsay’s bylines as Question Time plays in the background. She’s very patchy, he notices. Sometimes she seems capable of doing her job and just reporting actual news, but a good half of the time she inserts herself, shows her partisan attitudes, even makes jokes. It’s those articles, he notices, that seem to carry her picture at the top.
‘Unprofessional,’ he mutters as he mouses and clicks. The way she digs and exposes and thinks it’s OK to be flippant about her subjects. Maybe I ought to take up journalism. Maybe I should start by doing an exposé on her.
Jackie’s still not answering. He puts the phone on to Speaker and Automatic Redial and continues his search for Kirsty Lindsay. She doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. Doesn’t seem to show up at all much before 1999. Degree from the Open University, 1998, then a slow trickle of bylines from a local paper in the Midlands. He starts searching backwards. Tries Facebook, Myspace, Friends Reunited, Genes Reunited. She has no presence on any of them. Doesn’t get a mention attached to any school, any reunions, any relatives; clearly never won a prize, never distinguished herself in any way, and no one has been looking for her.
Suddenly he realises that a voice is coming from the handset. She’s picked up. He snatches it up and puts it to his ear. ‘Hello?’
A woman’s voice, cold and hard; suspicious. ‘Who is this?’
‘Who is this?’ he asks.
‘Who did you want to speak to?’
‘Jackie. Jackie Jacobs,’ he says. ‘Have I dialled the wrong number?’
A fractional pause. ‘Who’s calling?’
‘Martin,’ he says.
‘Martin who?’
‘Martin Bagshawe.’
He hears her breathe. The voice is faintly familiar. It’s someone he’s met before, someone he knows. Not well, but he doesn’t know anyone well, really.
‘OK, Martin,’ she says, ‘I need you to listen to me very carefully and pay attention to what I say.’
A surge of adrenalin makes him dizzy. She’s dead. Something’s happened to her.
‘Is Jackie OK?’ he asks. ‘What’s happened?’
‘She’s fine,’ she says sharply. ‘And Martin, in answer to your question, you’re what’s happened.’